henry quirk wrote: ↑Wed Oct 23, 2024 12:35 amIn context: we're talking about the Creator, the Prime Mover, literally The First Principle. It's not right, then, to say morality extends from, or issues from, or was established by, God. God is morality. He is the Measure.
If we say *God created this world* we have to accept that God created a rather terrible, violent, uncompromising, cruel world. That is, the world of Nature. It is a world where creature consumes creature in a terribly process where energy, and being, is consumed and which cycles in what we note as *the ecological system*.
It is an
unforgiving world, yes. Given the regularity of its workings, its mechanisms, why would anyone expect it to be otherwise? Is this
unforgivingness cruel and terrible? That's an
eye of the beholder assessment. I find such a view held, most commonly, by those with buffers between them and the world, like your average city dweller. Country folks tend to see less cruelty and terribleness in the natural or mechanistic world, becuz we live in it and understand.
In that world there is no morality -- not in any sense comparable to our human, social moralities. It seems to me that this is plain as day, and as such it is a frightening truth to face.
It is plain as day. Morality, as fact, is for man,
persons, The bear mauling the hunter is an amoral being. It bears no, cannot bear, moral responsibility. The hurricane ripping apart a town is an amoral cluster of forces. It bears no, cannot bear, moral responsibility. The animal, the forces, are not good or evil, not moral or immoral, not right or wrong. The animal and the forces are very much examples of the regularity, the mechanisms, of the world.
Gary, it seems to me, struggles mightily with this problem. It is a dog eat dog world. Or, as the Rishis of ancient India thought, it is a fish eat fish world.
Gary is a broken soul. I say this without insult but as a matter of fact.
Now, our morality, and our sense of supernaturalism, always has to do with a countermanding Idea. That Idea, that sense of what is right and good, directly opposes *the way of the world*. It is established, in this sense, as operating *against the world*. And when the world is seen in that light, the world is *the domain of Satan*. The more that one gets subsumed into the *world*, the more one becomes naturalistic, as opposed to supernaturalistic. The more earthly you get, the more realistic you get in naturalistic terms, and the more involved in real power-dynamics.
Our morality is part and parcel to our being persons. We're free wills, in the libertarian sense. We're capable of moral discernment and judgement and therefore are subject to moral judgment. I don't see the conflict between this and the natural world. I can morally judge the murderer, the slaver, the rapist, the thief, the defrauder or anyone who chooses to use his fellows as commodity. He is a person, a hylomorph, same as me. Like me, he takes a dim view of being commodified. He chooses, though, unlike me, to commodify others. In short: he knows right from wrong and he can be judged, held accountable. I can hate the bear who eats my face, hate the hurricane that kills my family and leaves me ruined. But neither are accountable.
Again: I see no conflict.
I do, though, see the
schizophrenia that arises when a person divorces himself from his own personhood. He is enraptured by, or boondoggied into, the idea man is a
mechanism like the bear. He is not a, or has no, free will. His morality is subjective and relative and only a preference. He is left rudderless, adrift. His common sense negated. His own sense of himself as
person is destroyed. The one small saving grace for him: he's not responsible. His thinking, his acts, are not his own. He is driven by his genes, his upbringing, to think
this and do
that. Further, he is small. The world is big, full of powers who
allow him to be. So, it's not his fault he must, like those powers, lie, cheat, steal, and murder. Those powers take what and who they want, he reasons, so why shouldn't I?
In his bones, deep down, he knows he's wrong. He knows he's been gypped. He lacks the courage to be a person, to be responsible, to be accountable, even as he continues to, privately, judge his fellows and hold them accountable. He is a mad coward. The man who would be
meat machine.
Now, how do we reconcile the God who fabricated The World as it actually is, with the God of *goodness*? It is certainly just a wee bit of a problem!
The two are not reconcilable becuz both are wrongheaded ideas. God is not
good. God is just. God is moral. Justice and morality can be harsh. The world simply
is. It has no metaphysical undergirding. It is forces and particles. And we, persons, are
in the world but not
of the world. We are hylomorphic (in the Thomistic sense), bodies and souls. Not a one of us is small or powerless. Our choices matter. We have moral weight. We're accountable, to ourselves, to our fellows when we wrong them, and to God (yes, I'm a deist, a particular and, admittedly,
peculiar kind of deist. No, it does not seem to me God
interferes. If we are to remain free wills how can He? Our choices must be free or those choices are morally vacant. We must be
hands off. In the same way, for the same reason, we must be a mystery to Him.
Can he know what I will do? Probably.
Does He? It does not seem to me He does. I, for one, am not a robot, which is all I could be if He chose to know my next five minutes, hours, weeks, etc. If this sounds like an extreme variant of Open Theism it's becuz it is.)
All that I would say is that one must either awaken to that *metaphysical principle* (supernaturalism) and choose to the degree one can, to live through it, and mold the world by it, or to choose to return to *naturalism*: the power-dynamic, the realness of the will to power.
Yes. We choose to recognize ourselves as persons and in doing so acknowledge we are sumthin' more than mechanism. We conclude there is a Creator and we are
in His image. Or, we choose to see ourselves as
particles and forces.
I do not quite understand what you take away from this statement.
Here it is again:
to the degree we play interpretation games with this metaphysical principle, we distance ourselves from the principle. More concretely, borrowing from a post I made sometime back in the Christianity thread: when we focus on the jar -- it's ornamentation, let's say -- we ignore the jar's purpose (holding life-preserving water). We're dying of thirst as we dicker on filigree.
Simply: like a city dweller buffered against the unforgivingness of the natural world, who sees the world as cruel and terrible, when we buffer ourselves from a just and moral God, creating human intermediaries and constructs --
lenses -- we distort what is in front of our face. The
water, the
truth, is free, wholly accessible to everyone. It requires nuthin' more than a *cupped hand. We bottle it, mystify it, sell it. And we make the packaging as important as the content.
if you wanted to get really the the heart of this conflict
That conflict is a false one. It sez, at the root,
my god is right and yours is wrong. The true conflict is between
those folks (who are one camp) and those who mind their own business and keep their hands to themselves, who expect nuthin' from their fellows except respect for life, liberty, and property.
Personally, I find the Church too buffering, too distorting.
Christianity, though, raw and
mere, that's a bird of a different color. I would be an exceedingly **bad Christian. I respect it, and those who have taken it up, just the same.
*An important image. The cupped hand implies intent, decision, we
choose to drink. How can it be otherwise? A person, a free will, must choose his living.
I recognize myself as what I am, or I choose the lie I am sumthin' less.
**I will not turn the other cheek. Lay hands on me (interfere with my life, liberty, and property) and I will hold you accountable. I go out of my way to mind my own business and keep my hands to myself. My expectation is you do the same.
so I stopped that horrific rendition at second three. You intended to ruin my day — maybe even my life! — but you didn’t and you can’t. 